Is Twitter Killing Off Third-Party Services?

Apps such as Twitpic, Twitgoo and Yfrog have long been employed by users wishing to show images to their Twitter followers. In fact, Twitter even started supporting in-stream photo viewing with the revamping of Twitter.com.

But with Twitter's soon-to-roll-out service, which will allow users to upload photos directly to Twitter via the official web and mobile apps, third-party services are being cut out of the picture.

A Twitter rep said in an email to Mashable, "We’re still supporting other third-party photo services in our mobile and desktop clients, so users can choose the one that works best for them."

Although Twitter isn't immediately revoking API access or support for these apps, it is entering into an entirely new field of competition. And the Twitpic and Yfrog devs certainly didn't expect they'd be competing with Twitter.

We spoke with Twitpic founder Noah Everett Wednesday via email. "We had no idea Twitter was building a photo feature. Communication between developers and Twitter has never been very clear and the relationships between Twitter and its developers has changed a lot since the Chirp conference last year," he said. "A more clear feature roadmap and better communication would have been much appreciated by all their developers."

Twitter's Turning Point

Everett refers to a turning point in the Twitter/third-party dev relationship about a year ago. Until spring 2010, Twitter apps built with Twitter APIs had been allowed to flourish with little interference and no competition from Twitter.

But at Chirp, the company's first developer conference, Twitter announced it had acquired Tweetie, a popular iPhone client from dev shop Atebits. Before then, no one thought Twitter was going to develop an official mobile client, and an entire ecosystem of third-party Twitter mobile apps had sprung up.

With the Tweetie announcement, Twitter effectively crushed the futures of quite a few startups and mobile dev shops. The company had allowed and encouraged the development of these mobile apps, and it was now in direct competition with them.

And today, we're seeing the same story being played out with photo-sharing apps.

Whose Business Is It, Anyway?

Of course, it's Twitter's prerogative to build user-requested features in-house rather than letting third-party apps capture all that traffic. The company's API isn't a public utility, and no one but Twitter actually has the right, in the legal sense, to use it.

None of the third-party devs would deny that Twitter needs to make money on its own product. What they do resent is the poor communication between the company and outside devs.

For example, early in the history of the company's API, co-founder Biz Stone said, "The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas."

However, every time third-party devs come up with an overwhelmingly popular feature, Twitter has swooped in and quickly dominated the space, putting indie devs out of business. And image-sharing is without doubt hugely popular. Twitpic.com alone gets around 10% of the traffic seen on Twitter.com, according to three traffic-reporting sites.

Ever since the turning point at Chirp, investing one's time, effort and capital into a Twitter app has been a risky proposition, and as Twitter continues to encroach on the domain of third-party services, the opportunity for building a sustainable Twitter app becomes narrower and less certain.

Can Third-Party Apps Survive?

Just as Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur once told the anti-Twitter complainers at Chirp to [redacted] themselves, Everett is sticking to a staunchly optimistic line when it comes to Twitpic's future.

While he admits he is "not sure what strategy we will be taking with Twitpic currently," he does say, "We believe that Twitpic will live on. We've built an extremely powerful, worldwide brand, and we own that brand ... regardless of this feature announcement from Twitter."

But in fact, the fate of Twitpic, Yfrog and other third-party photo-sharing services remains uncertain. (Twitgoo's predicament is unique, since that brand is under the Photobucket umbrella, and Photobucket is hosting Twitter's official photo-sharing feature.)

At any rate, this latest development will certainly serve as further discouragement to any developer (or investor) with an eye on the Twitter ecosystem outside Twitter itself.

Mashable
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